Politics on the couch?

 Andrew Samuels

Everything I am going to write will be wrong but everything that will be said against it will be wrong as well.

My intention is to test out and explore the boundaries that we have been told exist between therapy and politics, between the inner world and the outer world, between being and doing, and even between what people still call ‘feminine’ approaches to life and ‘masculine’ approaches to life – no matter how problematic those words are.

This short paper divides into a number of sections. I’ll begin by addressing the questions ‘Why me, why here, why now?’  Then I’ll discuss how politics in the West is changing in the direction of what I call ‘transformative politics’.  Thirdly, I’ll ask ‘Can therapists really make a difference in the world today?’  Fourthly, there’s a rather experiential section entitled ‘the inner politician’. Finally, to conclude, I’ll offer a few reflections on therapy, politics and spirituality.

INTRODUCTION: WHY ME, WHY HERE, WHY NOW?

The  bases for these remarks, which are firmly grounded in clinical work with individuals, also lie in my involvement with a number of political organisations and recent political developments. I have carried out consultations and conducted workshops with members of the public in Britain, Europe, the United States, Japan, Brazil, Israel, Australasia and South Africa. These activities are designed to see how useful and effective perspectives derived from psychotherapy might be in the formation of policy, in new ways of thinking about the political process, and in the resolution of conflict. It is difficult to present therapy thinking so that mainstream politicians – for example, a senior Democrat Senator or a Labour Party committee – will take it seriously, And the problem is only slightly reduced when the politicians and organisations are ‘alternative’ or more activist.  But it can be done.

I have also been involved in the formation of three organisations in Britain that are relevant to this panel. Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility is an organisation intended to help therapists and counsellors use their knowledge and experience to intervene as professionals in social and political matters. The second organisation is Antidote, a psychotherapy-based think tank.  It fosters multidisciplinary work, and links are sought with people working in fields other than  psychotherapy. Antidote has undertaken research into psychological attitudes to money and economic issues and is also involved in trying to apply ideas about emotional literacy/intelligence to politics.

The third organisation is the St James’s Alliance. Based at a church in Piccadilly in Central London, it consists of individuals from diverse fields such as politics, economics, ethics, religion, non-governmental organisations, activist and pressure groups, the media and psychotherapy. It attempts to incorporate psychological, ethical and spiritual concerns into the political agenda and to facilitate a dialogue between various single-issue and pressure groups. These groups were unsympathetic to each other’s goals – poverty workers not having much time for animal liberation. But in a suitable environment, it was possible to find  whole areas of common ground in relation to politics, and there were so many emotional and imaginal similarities to share. This was an experiment in gathering and using political energy that is normally split up and dissipated.

Politics in many Western countries is broken and in a  mess; we urgently need new ideas and approaches. I argue that psychotherapists, alongside economists, social scientists, religious people, environmentalists and others, can contribute to a general  transformation of politics.

Today’s politicians leave us with a sense of deep despair and disgust. They lack integrity, imagination and new ideas. Across the globe, and in response to the challenge, a search is on to remodel politics. Psychotherapy’s contribution to this search depends on opening up a two-way street between inner realities and the world of politics. We need to balance our attempts to understand the secret politics of the inner world of emotional, personal and family experiences with the secret psychology of pressing outer world matters such as leadership, the economy, environmentalism, nationalism and war.

Our inner worlds and our private lives reel from the impact of policy decisions and the existing political culture. Why, then, do our policy committees and commissions not have a psychotherapist sitting on them as part of a range of experts? This is not a call for a committee of therapists! But just as a committee will often have a  statistician present, whose role might not be fully enjoyed by the other members, so, too, there should be a therapist at the conference table. You would expect to find therapists having views to offer on social issues that involve personal relationships but we have also got ideas to contribute on the ‘hard’ issues as well – war, violence, poverty and the economy.

I would like us to imagine a world in which people are encouraged to sharpen their half-thought out, intuitive political ideas and commitments so as to  be able to take more effective political action as and when they want to. There are buried sources of political wisdom in everyone, even the rednecks and the racists, the fundamentalists and the number crunchers. Crucially, more and more, I look to introverted people, the shy ones, to poets and mystics, to the older generation who seem to get angrier about the state of the world rather than more accepting of it,  and those whose attitude to politics is to avoid involvement – these folk know much that the more active and talkative among us do not. They are a great aid in finding out how secret things, such as childhood experiences, intimate relationships, fantasies (including sexual fantasies), dreams and bodily sensations, might be reframed and turned to useful  political ends.

Thinking about those who don’t say much, I have a lot of experience in running what I call ‘political clinics’, which are usually composed of people who have nothing to do with therapy and psychology at all, but who come together to explore their emotional and feeling-based reactions to major political themes such as terrorism, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, racism, homelessness (to give a few examples). I have discovered that people who say ‘I am not interested in politics’ are often deceiving themselves, caught in a reaction formation.  Then you discover, as the event unfolds, that they are indeed extremely interested, knowledgeable and wise about politics, but have always doubted, because they have been taught to doubt, that the inward emotional reactions they are having are a legitimate  part of  political process. We have educated our peoples in the Western countries, not to deny that they have emotions about politics, because that would be impossible, but to put those emotions rather low down on the scale of what we value in official political debate and political discussion.

Sometimes, at the conclusion of these political clinics, we start to talk in terms of citizens as ‘therapists of the world’ who have a large set of  usable countertransferences to the political culture in which they live. Now you all know that, in much psychological theorising about citizens, the citizen is regarded as a kind of baby, who has a  transference and a collection of fantasies towards the ‘parental’ society in which she or he lives. Flipping that round, so that the citizen is seen as a kind of therapist or parent towards the society, has a radical, uplifting and empowering effect, It overturns the tradition, especially in psychoanalysis,  in which the citizen is seen as the baby and society as the parent. This claim, that the citizen is capable of being the therapist (or the parent) of the world is one that I think embodies a lot of possibilities as we struggle to work out what citizens are for and what their internal life will be in a highly fraught political climate dominated by corporations and cartels.

TRANSFORMATIVE POLITICS

We move on now to the second section of the paper, which is about how politics is slowly changing in Western countries. We are at a very interesting moment in political consciousness. What used to be an elitist insight about how political everything secretly was is now on the verge of becoming an element in mass awareness. For years now, feminists, academics, intellectuals, some therapists and analysts have lived happily with the idea that the personal, psychological and private worlds are full of political tensions, dynamics and energies. But actually this has been an elite form of knowing, a political Gnosticism. So ‘we’ knew that politics has expanded its definition to include all the private stuff. But the people, the masses, did not. They continued to be taught, but, I think, now accept much less, that politics means official politics, party-politics, parliamentary politics, power politics, the politics that money can buy and so on. What has helped to accelerate the democratisation of the personal-is-political insight has been the huge eruptions of feelings over certain events. A level of affect is achieved that turns mere events into what can justly be called archetypal experiences: Diana grief, American experience and involvement (or lack of it) in world politics, or the role of women in societies across the planet. The most ruthlessly successful contemporary politicians, such as Tony Blair, have perceived this move into general awareness of the elitist, Gnostic, private knowledge about how politics has changed.

Another way in which politics has changed is that it has become more and more of a  transformative process. By this I mean that engagement in political activity and processes of personal growth and development are seen increasingly as the same thing or at least two sides of a coin. If you talk to people active in post-Seattle politics, or in the environmental movements, or in certain sectors of feminism and the mens’ movement, or in ethno-politics, you will see that what they are doing is in many respects self-healing in a way that is familiar to psychotherapists.. So politics starts to carry a psychological, transformative burden in the way it hasn’t much up to now. Sadly, this kind of transformative politics is not only progressive and left-leaning, it can also be spotted in many right-wing and reactionary movements.

A third way in which politics has changed is that there is now something which I want to call ‘political energy’ to be considered alongside political power. Political power is what you would imagine it is. It is control over resources, such as land, or water or oil – or indeed, information and imagery. Especially today, the issue of who controls information and imagery, for example on the Internet and satellite television, is almost as important as the issue of who controls oil or water. Political power is held by the people you would expect to hold it: men, white people, middle and upper-middle class people, and those who run the big institutions of finance, the military and the academic and professional worlds.

Political energy is different. It is almost the opposite of political power.  Political energy involves idealism and an imaginative and visionary focus on certain political problems with a view to making a creative impact in relation to those problems (not necessarily  with the goal of ‘solving’ them). Political energy seeks out more political energy in an attempt to build up to critical mass. It is different from political power because people who have political energy, imagination, commitment, idealism, real compassion, almost by definition lack political power. And, equally, almost by definition, people who have political power tend to lack political energy. This is a fundamental and radical claim that I am sure will be much disputed!

People with political energy are doing something rather new and different in the Western world today compared to what those with political power are doing. This thought is quite liberatory if you are working in a  small neighbourhood group, or a social and political project with limited resources and support, or alongside people who have been abused, or  trying to build up an environmentally informed movement for sustainable development and wordwide economic justice. If you are doing any or all of these things then you probably do not have much power. It is very easy then to judge yourself the way the conventional political world might judge you – as a waste of time and space when it comes to ‘real’ politics.

But the very notion of political energy (with the intellectual limitations in such a term absolutely clear to this speaker) is intended to shift this way of thinking. Very often when I talk about this, people say, as they did in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2000: ‘Yes, and we wonder what would happen if our country valued political energy as much as it values political power’.

CAN THERAPISTS REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Although enthusiastic about psychotherapy’s role in refreshing political culture, I am also somewhat sceptical. So my answer to this question ‘Can therapists really make a difference?’ is both ‘no’ and ‘yes’. Let's deal with 'no’ first, with the pessimism. James Hillman and Michael Ventura wrote a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the Worlds  is Getting Worse. I am sure you can see what they were getting at. Yet I think that a much more accurate title for their book would have been ‘We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy Trying to Improve the World but the World has Stayed Pretty Much the Same’.  You see, it is not a new project for psychotherapists to want to do something in relation to the world. Freud wanted it, Jung wanted it, and the great pioneers of humanistic psychotherapy like Maslow, Rogers, and Perls all wanted it as well. All of these people and their followers invited the world into therapy but the world didn’t show up for its first therapy session. And I think there is a good reason why the world didn’t show up, not just resistance. The reason is that therapists so much want and need to be right! (Me too, this shadow issue is not one I’ve fully dealt with.) Therapists want to reduce everything to the special knowledge that they have. This kind of reductionism gets therapy a bad name when it comes to political and social issues. For example, I remember reading in the London Guardian an article by a Kleinian psychoanalyst about the phallic symbolism of cruise missiles going down ventilator shafts in Baghdad. My Jungian colleagues are just as bad when they tell us that the military-industrial complex is all the responsibility of the Greek God Hephaestos. The world won’t listen to that level of explanation and is right not to.

But there is more than therapy reductionism that has stopped us from being useful outside of a few specific areas like psychoanalytically influenced social casework or, in some cases, child welfare legislation. Overall there is a fairly bad record to own up to. Psychotherapists have colluded with oppressive regimes in Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, Argentina and South Africa. They have been involved in dubious activities such as sending soldiers suffering from shellshock and battle fatigue back to the line of battle in both World Wars. In addition to that kind of bad record, there is also the ever-present collusion of psychotherapy with all kinds of normative and oppressive practices at home, ranging from the psychopathological stigmatisation of lesbians and gay men (which still continues in many implicit ways), or the easy joining in by therapists all over the world in right-wing politicians’ attacks on father-lacking lone parent families usually headed by women. On this right-wing reading, these families, which are totally responsible for spoiling our wonderful world, only need  a father or father figure to come back to sort them out. I love fathers and was one of the first to write about what good-enough fathers actually do, especially with their bodies, in furthering the sexual, aggressive and spiritual development of their children. But I utterly loathe the damaging idealisation of fathers that so many Western politicians have gone in for, backed by complacent therapists and other mental health professionals.

Then there is the problematic matter of the universality of psychotherapy’s claim that western androcentric, middle-class values and ways of thinking are superior to and can be imposed on the values and ways of thinking of non-Western cultures. The treatment of women within much psychoanalytic thinking and practice, whilst obviously not in the Taliban league by any means, has also been pretty damaging.  What a lot of therapists and analysts say about men hasn’t been much more useful, either. The rise of feminist and gender-sensitive  psychotherapy has had an important impact in ameliorating this situation.

Another reason why people are not so likely to listen to therapists who want to make a difference in the world is that therapists are completely crazy in their own professional politics and the way they organise themselves radiates that craziness. No profession has been quite as subject to splits as the therapy profession, no profession has so frequently used personal demonization and pathological pigeonholing to deal with and get rid of troublesome outsiders and those who question from within

Continuing to look at why we world-oriented therapists don’t have a client, I must say that, for reasons that I do not fully understand even now, the therapy world has tragically split its clinical project off from its sociocritical project.  Frankfurt School writers rarely talk of clients, or in an ordinary way about mothers, fathers, families, marriages, dreams, symptoms, sexuality, aggression, the inner world of the imagination. And when you read clinical texts, the external world is hardly mentioned.  Most therapy seems (or claims) to take place in a vacuum filled only by neutrality and non-judgemental acceptance. There are several delusional aspects of this virginal fantasy about what we do. One is that there are no politics going on the session itself, whereas many of us know how the power dynamics and imbalances of the typical therapy set up cannot be wished away by reference to parental transference and the Terrible Mother. These power imbalances often involve the denial of difference of any kind between therapist and client, the bending of the client to the moral will of the therapist and the ongoing scandal of sexual misconduct. (I wrote about these topics in a paper ‘From Sexual Misconduct to Social Justice’ published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 1996.)

Another delusion is that it is not possible to find a responsible way to work directly with political, social and cultural material in the clinical session. I am not planning to say much more about this here, though I have written extensively on how we might change our practices and our thinking about clinical work in order to incorporate these taboo topics.

However, I would like to tell you about some research I did to see what was happening at the interface of therapy and politics in the actual session. 2000 analysts and therapists of many schools world-wide  were surveyed about which political issues their clients mentioned in therapy. I asked how frequently the clients raised such issues, whether this was increasing or decreasing, and about how the therapists reacted. I also asked the respondents about their own political views and histories. Aside from  revealing that the therapy profession is far more politically sensitive than one would think and that politics is a welcome theme in a significant minority of clinical offices, the answers, published in The Political Psyche made it clear that clients are raising economic, environmental and gender–political issues in their therapy sessions much more than they used to. The respondents clearly wanted to honour this development but almost all admitted that they lacked training, helpful texts and a general encouragement to do it on a regular, professional, reputable basis. 

THE INNER POLITICIAN

Now let’s become more experiential and personal. Where did you get your politics from? I think this is a question worth asking. What influence did your mother have on the politics you now have? Or your father? And what about differences in political outlook between your parents? Some people have been influenced in their political development by significant other people: teachers, priests, an older friend at school. The sex you are is really very significant in the kind of attitude to politics that you will have. Your sexual orientation is equally important. Lesbians and gay men live more closely to those political aspects and nuances or life than straight people do. Class and socioeconomic factors are obviously important, too, and so is one’s ethnic, religious and national background.

There is a common experience in Western societies of feeling oppressed by a domestic tyrant, whether male or female, or seeing other family members as oppressed, that can give rise to a sharp sense of injustice and embryonic revolutionary feelings.

Sometimes, when I talk to people about what has formed their politics they start to speak about an event or moment in history that they can remember – their first political memory, meaning the first time they became aware that there is a political system with power at its core, including disparities of wealth and influence.  If some readers are following along in this experiential political journey, then ask yourselves ‘Did I discuss these first political memories with my therapist?’ Most people, on the whole, have not had that kind of experience in therapy, save as an unavoidable part of a mutual exploration of some huge external event that has dominated everyone’s lives (such as September 11^th last year). Though a fascinating moment in any therapy, this engagement with high drama is simply not the same as struggling to working out regular, ongoing ways of working in the session with the client’s political selfhood (and that of the therapist)  as they have evolved over a lifetime. All that said, we can definitely learn a fair amount about  how to do this in an ordinary way by sharing experiences of the very un-ordinary in politics. But we still need much more work on the mutually transformative aspects of what I call ‘political discussion’ within the sealed vessel of the therapy relationship.

Another way to look at this notion of the inner politician is to imagine a political energy scale, where ten stands for political fanaticism, even martyrdom. Zero stands for absolute passivity and a total lack of interest in politics. Where would you place yourself right now in your life, what level of political energy do you have? Then you can play around with the scale. When you’re with people of the same sex does the energy level go up or down or stay the same? Is it higher at home or at work? Are there some issues that send it skyrocketing and some issues that bring it down. Think of the last big interpersonal disagreement or fight with someone you love. Could it be that there was a different level of political energy at work in each of you?

Let’s take this thinking right into the traditional heartland of psychotherapy. What was your mother’s level of political energy compared to yours, or to your father’s?  More widely, what was your level compared to the typical level of the street or neighbourhood in which you grew up?

Continuing to talk about the inner politician, I come to the question of ‘political style’. I have noticed in the conflict resolution work that I have done that the various people in conflict are often operating, not only with very different levels of political energy, but also in very different political styles. 

Hence, in my work as a political consultant, I am using this idea of political style in many  settings so I would like to tell you more about it. My inspiration in overall terms was Jung’s model of psychological types: extraversion, introversion, thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. As in life generally, for a variety of reasons, some of them to do with their personal backgrounds, some to do with their inborn political constitutions, people will live out the political aspects of themselves in different ways. Some will be violent terrorists; some pacifists. Some will want empirical back-up for their ideas; others will fly by the seat of their pants. Some will definitely enjoy co-operative political activity; others will suffer the nightmare of trying to accomplish things in a group only because they passionately believe in  the ends being pursued. As we begin to make a start on working out a psychologically driven transformative politics, let us not make the mistake of insisting that everyone do it in precisely the same way. If we are to promote political creativity, we need to value and honour diverse political styles and types, and to think of ways of protecting such diversity.

As I mentioned, the notion of political style is particularly useful when addressing conflict, whether interpersonal or within organisations or even between nations or parts of nations.  Just as introverts and extraverts suffer from mutual incomprehension, people or groups that employ a particular political style often have very little idea about how the other person or group is actually ‘doing’ their politics. This is not to say that political content per se is irrelevant, only that there may be more that divides opponents than their different views.

One might list images of differing political types as follows, in a spectrum ranging from active styles to passive ones: warrior, terrorist, exhibitionist, leader, activist, parent, follower, child, martyr, victim, trickster, healer, analyst, negotiator, bridge-builder, diplomat, philosopher, mystic, ostrich.

When working on questions of political style, it isn’t necessary to encourage anyone stick to just one style. In fact, the opposite holds true. The context in which the politics in question are taking place needs to be borne in mind. Some people will use one political style in one setting and quite another in a different one. A negotiator at work may be a terrorist at home. Or people may have a ‘superior’ political style, an ‘inferior’ political style and ‘auxiliary’ styles to borrow Jung’s words. Thus a warrior may have neglected her philosopher or a diplomat his activist.

All this was first fashioned out of  working with a mixed group of Israeli Palestinians and Israelis of Jewish background in Jerusalem in the early 1990s. It became clear that, aside from the obvious irreconcilable differences in how the Middle East political scene was understood, there were individuals on both sides of the divide who were participating in the group in very similar or identical ways. I pointed this out and reorganised the spatiality and seating plan of the group along style lines rather than content lines. There were discernible improvements in comprehension and even in goodwill.

The warring factions were presented not with an analysis of what they were saying (that came later), but with a panorama of the ways in which they were saying it, that is to say, with the style of politics they were using.

 PSYCHOTHERAPY, POLITICS AND SPIRITUALITY 

I want to conclude with the following thoughts.

Attempts are constantly made to improve things in the political world, usually by redistributing wealth or changing legislative and constitutional structures. It is not that nothing is being tried to make things better.  Equally vigorous attempts are made to resist and contest such changes and most social systems have a gigantic impersonal capacity to resist  change anyway. But projects of reform are valuable and necessary and will generate their own psychological changes. For example, the consequences of fair and effective minimum wage legislation or devolving power to the regions of a country would have effects that would show up on any ‘National Emotional Audit’ (to invent a new body!).

But a materialist approach deriving exclusively from economics, or one that depends solely on altering the structures of the state, will not refresh those parts of the individual citizen that a psychological perspective can reach. Our disappointment at liberal democracy’s failure to deliverer the spiritual  goods and our growing   realisation that there are limits to what can be achieved by economic redistribution or altering the constitution strengthen my overall argument: something is missing in contemporary Western politics that involves a calamitous denial of the secret life at its core. We can change the clothes, shift the pieces around, but the spectre that haunts materialist and constitutional moves in the political world is that they only ruffle the surface. They do not (because, alone, they cannot) bring about the transformations for which the political soul yearns.

I recognise fully that the perspectives I am advocating here may never, ever be applied to our political culture. Everything I and others  have said or done may fail to make one iota of difference to the condition of the world. So I will end with a few words about failure by Samuel Beckett, who lived and worked as closely as anyone with being a ‘good-enough’ citizen, meaning a profound acceptance of the need to go on in the face of not being able to go on: ‘No matter. Fail again. Fail better.’  

(Andrew Samuels D.H.L. is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and Visiting Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. He is a training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology, in clinical practice in London. He also works internationally as a political consultant. His many books have been translated into 19 languages and include The Father, The Plural Psyche, The Political Psyche and, most recently, Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life. This last book won the Gradiva Prize 2001 awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.)

Address for correspondence: 148 Mercers Road, London N19 4PX, UK. E-mail: andrew.samuels@virgin.net